Can woodpeckers play rugby or Charles Darwin, where are you when we need you?

There are those unenlightened folks out there who see rugby players as the classic example of coming from the shallow end of the gene pool. This is, of course, contrasted with the sport of cricket, which is seen to represent the pinnacle of human endeavour. So sublime is cricket, that Americans simply cannot understand it.

There is also an argument to be made that cricket represents intelligent design, being hand delivered from God to Moses along with the Ten Commandments, whereas derivative sports, such as baseball, represent evolution. I guess for Moses’ followers who spent forty years wandering in the wilderness, a game that took five days to finish seemed like a good idea at the time.

At a future sports medicine meeting, we should have a debate on this issue, which could be modelled on the famous Oxford evolution debate of 1860 where Thomas Huxley notably replied to Samuel Wilberforce, then Bishop of Oxford, that he “would rather be descended from an ape than from a cultivated man who used his gifts of culture and eloquence in the service of prejudice and falsehood”. The apocryphal story that arose from that quote was that Huxley had said he would rather be an ape than a Bishop. Perhaps the sports medicine equivalent would be that he would rather be an ape than a rugby player. That is, of course, assuming that there is a difference.

But what of …